I'm well aware that those times were edgier- it's actually part of why I missed it- the point is that back then you could still be genuinely concerned or even vaguely nationalistic without immediately being dogpiled by the opposition for having values or supporting something they don't.
In retrospect, I think part of it is that back then, a lot of opinionated people online were really into “debate”. As annoying and autistic as this was (because the goal wasn't actually to have a good argument, it was to smugly crush your opponent with Facts and Logic™), it meant that they at least
pretended to be giving their opposition a fair shake.
Now the opinionated people just straight up insist that their opposition is beyond the pale, and act like they shouldn’t need to explain why this is any more than they should have to explain why kidnapping people to steal their kidneys is wrong.
It’s no longer “okay, but here’s why
my opinion is objectively correct and
yours is so wrong it’s absurd”, it’s “oh my god, I can’t believe you actually think that, I really expected better from you”.
It's very late here, so hopefully I'm still coherent, but basically- from what I can tell, things were far less constantly connected. Even when this kind of shit existed back then, you wouldn't see it dominating twitter for a week and making discussion of the topic a living hell, you wouldn't see people getting angry or sad or anxious over stupid shit like it (on a massive scale), and you still had any chance to express your opinions on it without facing immediate rejection on the grounds of some stupid -ism of the week.
Granted, this started to disappear by the (very) late 2000s when the news started sticking its nose in the internet's shit and social media began to take off, but I'm mainly referring to early-000s internet from before all this (I'd say like 2000-2006 or 7ish).
We also just didn't take online interactions as seriously, in general.
That's not to say that people didn't get fired up over shit and there were never any massive arguments (I swear, every forum's off-topic section had a politics thread that was about three times longer than any other thread on the site), but it was also widely considered silly to do so. Anybody with half a brain knew that the internet was a place where you'd be encountering some people with crazy opinions.
I think it's excellent point about the news getting involved in internet stuff, because they basically framed "people with crazy opinions" as being dangerous.
